Xmas? You’ve had your fun ... it’s time for a Mrs May lecture
WESTMInSTER’S year began with a morning lecture – that was how it was billed – from the headmistress. Theresa May gave it to a room full of tame worthies at the Royal Society, a highceilinged, three-star hotel sort of place near the Mall.
not that we inkies were allowed into the gathering until the last minute. Beforehand we were detained for 45 minutes in a chairless, over-heated ante-room by a young woman who had clearly spent her Christmas training to be a martinet.
The event was organised by the Charity Commission. Why the bossy secrecy?
Anyway, people of Britain, you’ve had your fun. A lecture! Mrs May’s warm-up man was Commission boss Willie Shawcross, a charming, thrice-married mumbler who has devoted much of his life to easing the paths of the rich and mighty. Had Willie been a knight in Elizabethan days he would have spent half his life at the dry cleaner’s from the amount of times he placed his cloak in puddles for painted ladies.
After reminding us that ‘charity’ came from the Latin caritas, meaning ‘care’, which Thomas Aquinas called ‘the most excellent of the virtues’, dear old Willie murmured that he was ‘delighted’, nay ‘honoured’ to have Mrs May in the audience. He begged her to vouchsafe a few words.
Up she waddled in yellow and green scarf – shades of a 1970s airline stewardess – and Good Master Shawcross stood to round-shouldered attention, not wishing to stand too tall in case he made the PM look a tiddler.
She proceeded to cough up (literally, for she still has the cold that has been plaguing her for weeks) a speech of two parts.
The second part was about mental health and had been extensively trailed in the newspapers. It was pretty routine.
Politicians have latched on to mental health as an issue beyond criticism. If it makes them sound caring (caritas again), how jolly convenient. The first part of Mrs May’s oration was more interesting. In this she attempted to describe her political philosophy and explain how it chimed with the Brexit vote in last June’s EU referendum.
Repeatedly she used language that would not have disgraced a Guardian editorial: ‘Community and citizenship… burning injustices… solidarity… mission… not just the privileged few… the everyday injustices many people feel… your wages have stagnated for several years in a row… decisions made in faraway places… building something I call the shared society… the cult of individualism… there is more to life than individualism and self-interest… social justice… an active government.’
You would not hear such expressions at a Ukip conference, or, indeed, at a Trump rally.
Was Mrs May making a pitch for Labour and Lib Dem voters? That would make electoral sense. But it would be wrong to claim that this speech was devoid of Conservative principles. She was making an old Tory argument in favour of national institutions and of a certain level (undefined) of state intervention to support the decent but struggling lower middle-class.
She gave ‘mainstream, centreground government’ (ie the Blairites and Cameroons) repeated warnings that they needed to stop being so snooty about the electorate. And she spoke of ‘responsibilities’ and ‘the bonds and obligations that make our society work’. At times it felt less like a lecture than a sermon.
PRESEnTATIon is not her forte. The lighting was terrible. TV coverage later showed her with a shadow to her right. Such basic PR ineptness is in some ways to her credit as it shows she is little gripped by image-bending. But it is not necessarily a crime to seek to communicate as effectively as possible. It is possible to be both honourable and competent.
This did not trouble the audience of perhaps 400 charity types. They listened with rare obedience, turning to this PM like sunflowers towards a golden orb, even while she was spluttering and losing pace in her delivery. For all the aggro from Whitehall and the Remoaners at the BBC, she may slowly, remorselessly be reeling in the wider Establishment. They have nowhere else to go.